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In Reply to: RE: Context is the key. posted by Bob_C on August 28, 2014 at 17:58:40
Here in the heresy inquisition room I can only imagine the rules which would have been placed on proper usage of Herons steam toy. Not only does my PC do adding, it will also multiply and more. BTW I use my cd player to surf the net everyday though only rarely do I ever put cd's into it anymore.
Follow Ups:
Here is the way I see it.
One can enjoy music listening to an unmodified Mac or PC. But on the other hand, turning off services running in the background, unnecessary services for music reproduction, can result in superior sound quality. Also optimizing services, etc. can also help.
One can prove it to himself by trying the new Fidelizer 6 with Windows 8.1
It made a significant improvement in my setup.
Now there are other ways to optimize the computer without turning many services off and screwing with the OS. I just turned in my review of the exaSound e22 DAC and it will go up next week. I will be discussing some cool things that come with this DAC.
I appreciate your diplomatic approach to the subject.
I'd be interested trying something like Fidelizer to see if I could measure a difference in my system using the rudimentary tools I have available. Is there a windows 7 version?
you have been consistently preaching me and others on computer audio without even trying some of the minimisation techniques or power supply mods. You say you have a lab, but you have never to my knowledge posted any measurement results.
All you need to do to try Fidelizer is to Google. It actually doesn't do as much or as well as other Minimisation scripts and techniques.
In this, you have in common two or three other posters here, who work on the basis of preconceived 'convictions' that do not have a basis in fact.
Did you even read the post you responded to? My point has been all along that I just don't have time for the undetectable improvements by tweaks those like you are prone to drone on about endlessly. Your goofball descriptions with complete lack of substance to back them up makes your crap about worthless to me in most cases I can recall at the moment. I'd be very interested in something which actually catches my attention as making a noticeable/measurable difference. I will try and make some time to try this software test it to the best of my ability in my home environment and make a decision about whether I like it or not. Maybe I'll comment here about my results, maybe I'll post screen captures, maybe not. Unlike you I doubt I'll make broad sweeping claims with no way to back them up other than worthless claims full of hyperbole.
I have posted various screen shots etc on occasions though it doesn't bother me you can't remember them even though you have commented on them in the past. Of course since I am not the one constantly making ridiculous claims the burden has rarely been on me to provide supporting evidence of anything.
Indeed I do have a lab in my home. Not as well appointed as I'd like but improving slowly as the need and funding arises. Seems to accomplish what I need done at the moment. It's the labs I've had at work in the various companies I've worked for where the nice stuff has been available to me at times.
So, how do to find the time to make nonsensical statements on what others are doing, who can and do find changes for the better.
It is your inadequacy, not that of others.
I have plenty of time for doing what I feel like doing since I'm not spending all my time trying to fix my broken audio PC like you are constantly doing. It still doesn't mean I have time for your nonsense.
You can spend endless time testing an astronomical number of potential PC audio tweaks. Since you aren't inclined to do so, then I suggest you try a very simple one first to see if you can hear a difference. Experiment with buffer sizes in your hardware driver and/or your player software. Find the smallest size that works without audible glitches. Find the largest size that works. Now play music to your heart's content switching between old and new settings and see if you hear any differences. This test involves only one or two parameters, so it's hard to screw it up or do any damage. Just write down what the parameters were before starting and then put them back when you are done.
If you hear differences, then you go on to all the other tweaks. If you don't hear differences then there is no need to hang your head in shame. There are a large variety of reasons why others might hear differences that you do not:
1. The music you listened to was not suitable for uncovering the differences.
2. Your system has problems that limit its ability to show up differences that would otherwise have occurred.
3. You didn't hear any differences because you have not learned how to focus your attention so as to be able to hear them
4. You didn't hear any differences because you have hearing damage
5. You didn't hear any differences because there weren't any to hear because your system and its setup have excellent isolation between the digital and analog components and your DAC has excellent isolation from jitter and other variations from the ideal signal that an ideal transport might send to the DAC.
6. Others who hear differences are hearing defects in the corresponding portions of their systems, e.g. they have noise coupling through cabling, they use a DAC that lacks excellent isolation of digital noise, etc. They may find it more effective to tweak their computer than to get a new DAC that lacks this isolation, or they may have such a DAC but prefer not to use it because it is deficient in other characteristics such as clean analog sound.
7. Others who report hearing differences are fooling themselves. They may be misinterpreting random sensations as definitive results. This may be due to inexperience, carelessness or even dishonesty. From reading posts it is difficult to know how careful and experienced these posters may be. "On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog".
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
you have read and digested my posts, you will have learnt that I did this years ago and have posted on the subject.
For you personally, on your system - what is the result of that simple test with buffer size?
If I remember correctly (and I might not), at some point you insisted that it doesn't really affect sound quality.
discussed this with him several times; he just didn't or couldn't get it.
Now he brings it up as though this has been a revelation for him and others.
There is plenty on the audio web on the issue.
I have been aware of the buffer size issues from the very beginning of my use of computer audio, all the way back to 2005 when I first started using a computer system to record and playback music. They were already in print in that period, and cics explained some of the issues in his long thread. (Actually, my understanding of buffer size issues goes to far earlier periods, see below in this post.)
My position was and has been that if buffer size issues exist it is because of a deficiency in the DAC, not a fundamental defect in the transport. Adjusting the buffer sizes may be a free system tweak, but if it works it is just proof that the DAC is not as good as it might be. Ditto for decoding FLAC in real time. Again, this is a case where if you hear a difference it's because the DAC is not up to snuff. I doubt very much that either of you have experience designing audio cards, drivers and DSP software and understanding how all of the components fit together, from both a practical and a theoretical perspective. Instead you appear to be a bunch of tinkerers. It has been a basic principle of mixed signal systems to separate the digital and analog portions back as long as I can recall, which goes back to a summer job in 1961 working on a hybrid computer consisting of a digital computer coupled to an analog computer. The principles are well known, but the consumer audio marketplace has done a crappy job of following them. In general the best mixed signal engineers have not gone into consumer electronics. They have gone into military electronics, telecommunications and the computer industries, as this is where the money is.
Fmak, you make a lot of cryptic comments, but I can't think of much that I have learned from you. There are others here whose engineering comments have proven valuable and non-technical reviewers who have made a many cogent observations as to what they have heard.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I am not here to teach you and I do not preach to others either.
"For you personally, on your system - what is the result of that simple test with buffer size?"
Well, I don't recall what I may have posted in the past. However, the last time I checked this, my impression was : 1) smaller buffer sizes don't sound worse and 2) smaller buffer sizes probably sound better. I don't like to make definitive statements unless I am prepared to put my life, fortune or sacred honor on the line. :-)
While I am not certain that playing FLAC files doesn't sound worse than playing WAV files, I suspect that is the case on my system. I do not make a practice of playing FLAC files in real time. Instead, my practice is to convert them to WAV and then play the resulting WAV files. I get an additional benefit from this conversion: I store the resulting WAV files in a RAM disk, so I don't have to worry about I/O taking place from my 4 GB piece of spinning rust. While I have not personally heard differences between WAV files that were converted to FLAC and then re-converted back to WAV, I have observed that the two WAV files are not necessarily identical. While they have the same PCM samples the headers are sometimes different. Accordingly, I consider claims that WAV to FLAC and back to WAV produce different sounding files can be valid if the player software is not written appropriately. For this reason, I do not consider Cookie Marenco’s claims to be kooky. (I love the sound quality of her recordings, so I am certain that she has good hearing.)
Unfortunately, that Asus tablet that you suggested I purchase has proven an excellent device for reading documents and I have yet to butcher it up to use it for audio. (Thank you!) It seems to be fairly low power, but not as low power as I would like for an audio transport, probably because of the Intel processor and the use of DRAM instead of static RAM. So if you leave it on standby for a while the battery runs down and then you have to put up with the back of the unit getting warm while recharging the battery. My metric for a system being low noise is the equivalent of one that I came up with for cars in the 1960's. The less power consumption the better. So if you look at power consumption in watts, that's a single number where lower is clearly better. The metric for cars was gas mileage. I figured that worse gas mileage meant less efficiency and hence more wear and tear, and the general rule back then was that one dollar spent on gasoline translated sooner or later into one dollar spent on repairs. (Or more, in the case of my 1965 Lotus Elan.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
fmak,
I haven't been that impressed with Fidelizer in the past, but the new version 6 made a big difference in Extremist Mode.
I'm trying to purchase the Pro upgrade but haven't gotten a response yet.
S
I don't see special versions for OS, just the latest - 6. I requested to buy the Pro, but haven't heard back yet. The free version in Extremist mode worked well for me.
I make no promises that this won't screw up your system.
with Fidelizer is that it is opaque, unlike other published scripts that are transparent.
Fidelizer 5 can paralyse your PC, requiring a reboot, and all one has is the guy's say so that the script 'optimises' audio quality.
I'd rather use AudioPhil's.
One of the more effective scripts is to put the player and associated software into realtime or high priority mode and to move everything possible to low priority. Also assign audio to a single core and everything else to the rest. This is really simple to do and also assumes that the unneeded services and programs wrt to audio are disabled or not used.
I think Fidelizer 6 is much better than 5. But thanks for your suggestions; will try some of them.
and try lowest possible but good sounding buffers and minimise ram usage - no memory play. This reduces your power consumption from maybe 16G - to may be 500 M +- which I find on DoP. 100M- on native hirez files.
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